People Australia

Peter Tyler (1803-1842) compositor, convict and trade union official

Birth: 1 January 1803 at Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England. Marriage: 15 April 1833 at St Philip’s Church, Sydney, New South Wales, to fellow convict Ann Carrier (1810-1838), a housemaid, who had arrived in NSW aboard the Princess Royal on 9 May 1829. Death: 6 July 1842 at Sydney, New South Wales. Religion: buried with Anglican rites. 

• Convicted for burglary at the Old Bailey, London, on 13 September 1820. Transported with a life sentence to Australia, he reached Sydney on the Grenada on 16 September 1821. His occupation was given as printer, his height as 5 feet 4 ¼ inches, and he had a dark florid complexion, brown hair and hazel eyes.
• After working at Emu Plains, in August 1823 he was assigned to Henry Owen at the Hunter river.
• He was later assigned to Edward Smith Hall, owner of the Sydney Monitor, and was employed on that journal. On 12 March 1829, apparently acting on Governor Darling’s orders F. A. Hely, the superintendent of convicts, forcibly removed Tyler from Hall’s employment and dispatched him to work on a road gang at the distant settlement in the Wellington valley.
• Hall successfully challenged in the Supreme Court Darling’s transfer of Tyler. The Colonial Secretary, George Murray, commented on the case saying that the public would most likely view that action as Darling attempting to “harass a political opponent and to cripple his operation”.
• However, Tyler was again arrested in July 1829 and sent to hard labour at Bathurst. He obtained a ticket of leave there on 15 June 1831.
• Permitted to return to Sydney — on Hall’s application — after Colonel Patrick Lindsey became acting governor in October 1831, Tyler resumed work in Hall’s employment.
• He was the first secretary of the Australian (or Australasian) Society of Compositors (ASC) in 1835 — the earliest known trade union secretary in Australia — and corresponded over several years with employers on behalf of the union.
• On 20 November 1837 he was recommended for a conditional pardon. His wife died on 2 March 1838 at their residence in Cumberland Street.
• Tyler is believed to be the first person authorised to write to Great Britain on behalf of a trade union movement, notifying them of the conditions in the Australian printing trade.
• In January 1840, as secretary of the ASC, he wrote to Robert Howe (junior), proprietor of the Sydney Gazette, requesting a response to the society’s resolution limiting the employment of apprentices. The Gazette published the letter and in an editorial castigated Tyler as “a chartist leader” who “in the language of the trade, is considered a mop, and a man of intemperate habits not to be depended upon” and suggested that the letter “may be considered as a proof of unlawful combination, or as . . . a conspiracy on the part of the operative printers”. It appears that the society became defunct about 1840.
• In 1842 Tyler was employed on the Australasian Chronicle.
• Early in the morning of Thursday 7 July 1842 an employee of Governor Sir George Gipps found Tyler’s body suspended from a tree in the Domain, near the Government jetty. Evidence at the inquest later that day indicated that the deceased had been “very depressed in spirits, in consequence of some pecuniary difficulties”. The jury returned a verdict of suicide while in a state of temporary insanity.

Sources
Australian, (Sydney), 14 July 1840, 8 July 1842; John McDonald, ‘Australia’s First Trade Union Secretary’, in Bulletin of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, No. 3 (Canberra, November 1962), pp 44-51; T. D. Castle and Bruce Kercher, Dowling’s Select Cases 1828-1844, (Sydney, 2005), pp 568 and 570-574.